*The plane lurched. The businessman grabbed the armrest with white knuckles. One of the college girls screamed. Rose's hand shot out and found vaibhav's knee — the first time she'd touched him in months, maybe longer. Her nails dug in hard enough to leave marks.

The right engine sputtered and died. Smoke poured from the left one, the smell of burning oil filling the cabin like a bad dream. The plane dropped, nose first, and the world outside the window tilted into a sickening blue-green blur.

Then impact.

The cabin split apart like a tin can. luggage compartments burst open. The businessman went through the window — just gone, a red smear on the tarmac that wasn't a tarmac at all. It was ocean. Green water. Palm trees. An island.

The plane hit water maybe thirty seconds later, skipping once, twice, then breaking into pieces that floated in the surf like matchsticks. The force threw vaibhav sideways into the seat in front of him, and then everything went dark and wet and loud.

*When he woke up, he was face-down in shallow water, salt stinging his eyes, sand under his fingernails. His shirt was torn. He turned and looked behind him.

The plane was in pieces. The tail section had washed ashore maybe fifty yards down the beach, half-buried in white sand. fuel leaked from a gash in the metal, staining the water a dark orange. Some of the luggage had floated ashore too — a pink suitcase, a torn backpack, someone's sneaker — all waterlogged and half-buried.

And there, about thirty feet from where he lay, was a body.

Not his mother. One of the college girls, blonde hair fanned out in the surf like seaweed, her life vest half-inflated around her chest. Her eyes were open. She wasn't moving.

Further down the beach, maybe a hundred yards toward the treeline, something stirred. A shape. Human-sized. It was crawling — dragging itself through the wet sand on hands and knees.

Could be Rose.

The heat was already brutal. The kind that makes you dizzy if you stand too fast. vaibhav scrambled to his feet, legs wobbling like a baby deer. He stumbled toward the shape crawling through the sand — it was small, hunched, moving slow. The sun beat down on his back like a hot iron.

As he got closer, he could make out more details. Dark hair, matted with saltwater and something darker. A torn white blouse — no, that was his mother's blouse. Rose's blouse, soaked through and clinging to her frame as she dragged herself forward through the wet sand.

She was coughing. Spitting up seawater with each ragged breath, her arms shaking under her own weight. Her left leg bent at an angle that legs shouldn't bend.

She collapsed face-first into the sand and didn't move for a second. Then her fingers clawed at the ground, trying to pull herself forward another inch. *